Category Archives: produser

In mid-1994, sometime shortly after Tony Parisi and I had fused the new technology of the World Wide Web to a 3D visualization engine, to create VRML, we paid a visit to the University of Santa Cruz, about 120 kilometers south of San Francisco. Two UCSC students wanted to pitch us on their own web media project. The Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA, featured a simple directory of artists, complete with links to MP3 files of these artists’ recordings. (Before I go any further, I should state that they had all the necessary clearances to put musical works up onto the Web – IUMA was not violating anyone’s copyrights.) The idea behind IUMA was simple enough, the technology absolutely straightforward – and yet, for all that, it was utterly revolutionary. Anyone, anywhere could surf over to the IUMA site, pick an artist, then download a track and play it.

This was in the days before broadband, so downloading a multi-megabyte MP3 recording could take upwards of an hour per track – something that seems ridiculous today, but was still so potent back in 1994 that IUMA immediately became one of the most popular sites on the still-quite-tiny Web. The founders of IUMA – Rob Lord and Jon Luini – wanted to create a place where unsigned or non-commercial musicians could share their music with the public in order to reach a larger audience, gain recognition, and perhaps even end up with a recording deal. IUMA was always better as a proof-of-concept than as a business opportunity, but the founders did get venture capital, and tried to make a go of selling music online. However, given the relative obscurity of the musicians on IUMA, and the pre-iPod lack of pervasive MP3 players, IUMA ran through its money by 2001, shuttering during the dot-com implosion of the same year. Despite that, every music site which followed IUMA, legal and otherwise, from Napster to Rhapsody to iTunes, has walked in its footsteps. Now, nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we have a broadband infrastructure capable of delivery MP3s, and several hundred million devices which can play them. IUMA was a good idea, but five years too early.

Just forty-eight hours ago, a new music service, calling itself Qtrax, aborted its international launch – though it promises to be up “real soon now.” Qtrax also promises that anyone, anywhere will be able to download any of its twenty-five million songs perfectly legally, and listen to them practically anywhere they like – along with an inserted advertisement. Using peer-to-peer networking to relieve the burden on its own servers, and Digital Rights Management, or DRM, Qtrax ensures that there are no abuses of these pseudo-free recordings.

Most of the words that I used to describe Qtrax in the preceding paragraph didn’t exist in common usage when IUMA disappeared from the scene in the first year of this millennium. The years between IUMA and Qtrax are a geological age in Internet time, so it’s a good idea to walk back through that era and have a good look at the fossils which speak to how we evolved to where we are today.

In 1999, a curly-haired undergraduate at Boston’s Northeastern University built a piece of software that allowed him to share his MP3 collection with a few of his friends on campus, and allowed him access to their MP3s. This scanned the MP3s on each hard drive, publishing the list to a shared database, allowing each person using the software to download the MP3 from someone else’s hard drive to his own. This is simple enough, technically, but Shawn Fanning’s Napster created a dual-headed revolution. First, it was the killer app for broadband: using Napster on a dial-up connection was essentially impossible. Second, it completely ignored the established systems of distribution used for recorded music.

This second point is the one which has the most relevance to my talk this morning; Napster had an entirely unpredicted effect on the distribution methodologies which had been the bedrock of the recording industry for the past hundred years. The music industry grew up around the licensing, distribution and sale of a physical medium – a piano roll, a wax recording, a vinyl disk, a digital compact disc. However, when the recording industry made the transition to CDs in the 1980s (and reaped windfall profits as the public purchased new copies of older recordings) they also signed their own death warrants. Digital recordings are entirely ephemeral, composed only of mathematics, not of matter. Any system which transmitted the mathematics would suffice for the distribution of music, and the compact disc met this need only until computers were powerful enough to play the more compact MP3 format, and broadband connections were fast enough to allow these smaller files to be transmitted quickly. Napster leveraged both of these criteria – the mathematical nature of digitally-encoded music and the prevalence of broadband connections on America’s college campuses – to produce a sensation.

In its earliest days, Napster reflected the tastes of its college-age users, but, as word got out, the collection of tracks available through Napster grew more varied and more interesting. Many individuals took recordings that were only available on vinyl, and digitally recorded them specifically to post them on Napster. Napster quickly had a more complete selection of recordings than all but the most comprehensive music stores. This only attracted more users to Napster, who added more oddities from their on collections, which attracted more users, and so on, until Napster became seen as the authoritative source for recorded music.

Given that all of this “file-sharing”, as it was termed, happened outside of the economic systems of distribution established by the recording industry, it was taking money out of their pockets – probably something greater than billions of dollars a year was lost, if all of these downloads had been converted into sales. (Studies indicate this was unlikely – college students have ever been poor.) The recording industry launched a massive lawsuit against Napster in 2000, forcing the service to shutter in 2001, just as it reached an incredible peak of 14 million simultaneous users, out of a worldwide broadband population of probably only 100 million. This means that one in seven computers connected to the broadband internet were using Napster just as it was being shut down.

Here’s where it gets more interesting: the recording industry thought they’d brought the horse back into the barn. What they hadn’t realized was that the gate had burnt down. The millions of Napster users had their appetites whet by a world where an incredible variety of music was instantaneously available with few clicks of the mouse. In the absence of Napster, that pressure remained, and it only took a few weeks for a few enterprising engineers to create a successor to Napster, known as Gnutella, which provided the same service as Napster, but used a profoundly different technology for its filesharing. Where Napster had all of its users register their tracks within a centralized database (which disappeared when Napster was shut down) Gnutella created a vast, amorphous, distributed database, spread out across all of the computers running Guntella. Gnutella had no center to strike at, and therefore could not be shut down.

It is because of the actions of the recording industry that Gnutella was developed. If legal pressure hadn’t driven Napster out of business, Gnutella would not have been necessary. The recording industry turned out to be its own worst enemy, because it turned a potentially profitable relationship with its customers into an ever-escalating arms race of file-sharing tools, lawsuits, and public relations nightmares.

Once Gnutella and its descendants – Kazaa, Limewire, and Acquisition – arrived on the scene, the listening public had wholly taken control of the distribution of recorded music. Every attempt to shut down these ever-more-invisible “darknets” has ended in failure and only spurred the continued growth of these networks. Now, with Qtrax, the recording industry is seeking to make an accommodation with an audience which expects music to be both free and freely available, falling back on advertising revenue source to recover some of their production costs.

At first, it seemed that filmic media would be immune from the disruptions that have plagued the recording industry – films and TV shows, even when heavily compressed, are very large files, on the order of hundreds of millions of bytes of data. Systems like Gnutella, which allow you to transfer a file directly from one computer to another are not particularly well-suited to such large file transfers. In 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen solved that problem definitively with the introduction of a new file-sharing system known as BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is a bit mysterious to most everyone not deeply involved in technology, so a brief of explanation will help to explain its inner workings. Suppose, for a moment, that I have a short film, just 1000 frames in length, digitally encoded on my hard drive. If I wanted to share this film with each of you via Gnutella, you’d have to wait in a queue as I served up the film, time and time again, to each of you. The last person in the queue would wait quite a long time. But if, instead, I gave the first ten frames of the film to the first person in the queue, and the second ten frames to the second person in the queue, and the third ten frames to the third person in the queue, and so on, until I’d handed out all thousand frames, all I need do at that point is tell each of you that each of your “peers” has the missing frames, and that you needed to get them from those peers. A flurry of transfers would result, as each peer picked up the pieces it needed to make a complete whole from other peers. From my point of view, I only had to transmit the film once – something I can do relatively quickly. From your point of view, none of you had to queue to get the film – because the pieces were scattered widely around, in little puzzle pieces, that you could gather together on your own.

That’s how BitTorrent works. It is both incredibly efficient and incredibly resilient – peers can come and go as they please, yet the total number of peers guaratees that somewhere out there is an entire copy of the film available at all times. And, even more perversely, the more people who want copies of my film, the easier it is for each successive person to get a copy of the film – because there are more peers to grab pieces from. This group of peers, known as a “swarm”, is the most efficient system yet developed for the distribution of digital media. In fact, a single, underpowered computer, on a single, underpowered broadband link can, via BitTorrent, create a swarm of peers. BitTorrent allows anyone, anywhere, distribute any large media file at essentially no cost.

It is estimated that upwards of 60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers. Much of this traffic is perfectly legitimate – software, such as the free Linux operating system, is distributed using BitTorrent. Still, it is well known that movies and television programmes are also distributed using BitTorrent, in violation of copyright. This became absolutely clear on the 14th of October 2004, when Sky Broadcasting in the UK premiered the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore’s dark re-imagining of the famous shlocky 1970s TV series. Because the American distributor, SciFi Channel, had chosen to hold off until January to broadcast the series, fans in the UK recorded the programmes and posted them to BitTorrent for American fans to download. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the episodes circulated in the United States – and conventional thinking would reckon that this would seriously impact the ratings of the show upon its US premiere. In fact, precisely the opposite happened: the show was so well written and produced that the word-of-mouth engendered by all this mass piracy created an enormous broadcast audience for the series, making it the most successful in SciFi Channel history.

In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace. The ability to “hyperdistribute” a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were part-and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theaters and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the capability to “tuning into” a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has simply asserted its control over distribution. This is not about piracy. This is about the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary. They have the tools, they have the intent, and they have the power of numbers. It is foolishness to insist that the future will be substantially different from the world we see today. We can not change the behavior of the audience. Instead, we must all adapt to things as they are.

But things as the are have changed more than you might know. This is not the story of how piracy destroyed the film industry. This is the story how the audience became not just the distributors but the producers of their own content, and, in so doing, brought down the high walls which separate professionals from amateurs.

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google. There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video, difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure, absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet, even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a hyperabundance of viewing options.

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into ever-smaller “microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences is YouTube’s native tongue.

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM, surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a television, somewhere in the background, or it might be coming from the Web browser right in front of him. (Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as they’re broadcast over the airwaves, but more likely they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses. The broadcast network has been replaced by the social network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item might be something that was created at great expense for a mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch. Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all of his media decisions are weighed against the values and tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the importance, of that media to the individual and that individual’s social network. The mass market, with its enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations. Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that was uploaded to The Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.

That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two hundred million videos (probably much more), all available, all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much “there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching anything is measured against salience: “How important is this for me, right now?” When he weighs the latest episode of a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him. As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasingly-relevant suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets. His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of distribution. What no one had expected was that the professional producers would lose control of production. The difference between an amateur and a professional – in the media industries – has always centered on the point that the professional sells their work into distribution, while the amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that self-distribution is more effective than professional distribution, how do we distinguish between the professional and the amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film and television production and distribution can survive in this environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred year-old industry with many, many creative professionals. In this environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event” based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely designed to support the efficient distribution of live programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form, both industries will continue for some years to come, and will probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.

This future almost completely excludes “independent” production, a vague term which basically means any production which takes place outside of the media megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have long been losing economic propositions (except for the most lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal. National and regional funding bodies are growing increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off, despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent productions; productions which cost not millions of euros, but hundreds, and which make up for their low production values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down; it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era of media hyperabundance.

What then, is to be done?

III. And The Penny Drops

It isn’t all bad news. But, like a good doctor, I want to give you the bad news right up front: There is no single, long-term solution for film or television production. No panacea. It’s not even entirely clear that the massive Hollywood studios will do business-as-usual for any length of time into the future. Just a decade ago the entire music recording industry seemed impregnable. Now it lies in ruins. To assume that history won’t repeat itself is more than willful ignorance of the facts; it’s bad business.

This means that the one-size-fits-all production-to-distribution model, which all of you have been taught as the orthodoxy of the media industries, is worse than useless; it’s actually blocking your progress because it is effectively keeping you from thinking outside the square. This is a wholly new world, one which is littered with golden opportunities for those able to avail themselves of them. We need to get you from where you are – bound to an obsolete production model – to where you need to be. Let me illustrate this transition with two examples.

In early 2005, producer Ronda Byrne got a production agreement with Channel NINE, then the number one Australian television network, to make a feature-length television programme about the “law of attraction”, an idea she’d learned of when reading a book published in 1910, The Science of Getting Rich. The interviews and other footage were shot in July and August, and after a few months in the editing suite, she showed the finished production to executives at Channel NINE, who declined to broadcast it, believing it lacked mass appeal. Since Byrne wasn’t going to be getting broadcast fees from Channel NINE to cover her production costs, she negotiated a new deal with NINE, allowing her to sell DVDs of the completed film.

At this point Byrne began spreading news of the film virally, through the communities she thought would be most interested in viewing it; specifically, spiritual and “New Age” communities. People excited by Byrne’s teaser marketing could pay $20 for a DVD copy of the film (with extended features), or pay $5 to watch a streaming version directly on their computer. As the film made its way to its intended audience, word-of-mouth caused business to mushroom overnight. The Secret became a blockbuster, selling millions of copies on DVD. A companion book, also titled The Secret, has sold over two million copies. And that arbiter of American popular taste, Oprah, has featured the film and book on her talk show, praising both to the skies. The film has earned back many, many times its production costs, making Byrne a wealthy woman. She’s already deep into the production of a sequel to The Secret – a film which already has an audience identified and targeted.

Chagrined, the television executives of Channel NINE finally did broadcast The Secret in February 2007. It didn’t do that well. This sums up the paradox distribution in the age of the microaudience. Clearly The Secret had a massive world-wide audience, but television wasn’t the most effective way to reach them, because this audience was actually a collection of microaudiences, rather than a single, aggregated audience. If The Secret had opened theatrically, it’s unlikely it would have done terribly well; it’s the kind of film that people want to watch more than once, being in equal parts a self-help handbook and a series of inspirational stories. It is well-suited for a direct-to-DVD release – a distribution vehicle that no longer has the stigma of “failure” associated with it. It is also well-suited to cross-media projects, such as books, conferences, streamed delivery, podcasts, and so forth. Having found her audience, Byrne has transformed The Secret into an exceptional money-making franchise, as lucrative, in its own way, and at its own scale, as any Hollywood franchise.

The second example is utterly different from The Secret, yet the fundamentals are strikingly similar. Just last month a production group calling themselves “The League of Peers” released a film titled Steal This Film, Part 2. The first part of this film, released in late 2006, dealt with the rise of file-sharing, and, in specific, with the legal troubles of the world’s largest BitTorrent site, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay. That film, although earnest and coherent, felt as though it was produced by individuals still learning the craft of filmmaking. This latest film feels looks as professional as any documentary created for BBC’s Horizon or PBS’s Frontline or ABC’s 4Corners. It is slick, well-lit, well-edited, and has a very compelling story to tell about the history of copying – beginning with the invention of the printing press, five hundred years ago. Steal This Film is a political production, a bit of propaganda with an bias. This, in itself, is not uncommon in a documentary. The funding and distribution model for this film is what makes it relatively unique.

Individuals who saw Steal This Film, Part One – which was made freely available for download via BitTorrent – were invited to contribute to the making of the sequel. Nearly five million people downloaded Steal This Film, Part One, so there was a substantial base of contributors to draw from. (I myself donated five dollars after viewing the film. If every viewer had done likewise that would cover the budget of a major Hollywood production!) The League of Peers also approached arts funding bodies, such as the British Documentary Council, with their completed film in hand, the statistics showing that their work reached a large audience, and a roadmap for the second film – this got them additional funding. Now, having released Steal This Film, Part Two, viewers are again invited to contribute (if they like the film), promised a “secret gift” for contributions of $15 or more. While the tip jar – literally, busking – may seem a very weird way to fund a film production, it’s likely that Steal This Film, Part Two will find an even wider audience than Part One, and that the coffers of the League of Peers will provide them with enough funds to embark on their next film, The Oil of the 21st Century, which will focus on the evolution of intellectual property into a traded commodity.

I have asked Screen Training Ireland to include a DVD of Steal This Film, Part Two with the materials you received this morning. You’ve been given the DVD version of the film, but I encourage you to download the other versions of the film: the XVID version, for playback on a PC; the iPod version, for portable devices; and the high-definition version, for your visual enjoyment. It’s proof positive that a viable economic model exists for film, even when it is given away. It will not work for all productions, but there is a global community of individuals who are intensely interested in factual works about copyright and intellectual property in the 21st century, who find these works salient, and who are underserved by the media megacorporations, who would not consider it in their own economic best interest to produce or distribute such works. The League of Peers, as part of the community whom this film is intended for, knew how to get the word out about the film (particularly through Boing Boing, the most popular blog in the world, with two million readers a week), and, within a few weeks, nearly everyone who should have heard of the film had heard about it – through their social networks.

Both The Secret and Steal This Film, Part Two are factual works, and it’s clear that this emerging distribution model – which relies on targeting communities of interest – works best with factual productions. One of the reasons that there has been such an upsurge in the production of factual works over the past few years is because these works have been able to build their own funding models upon a deep knowledge of the communities they are talking to – made by microaudiences, for microaudiences. But microaudiences, scaled to global proportions, can easily number in the millions. Microaudiences are perfectly willing to pay for something or contribute to something they consider of particular value and salience; it is a visible thank you, a form of social reinforcement which is very natural within social networks.

What about drama, comedy and animation? Short-form comedy and animation probably have the easiest go of it, because they can be delivered online with an advertising payload of some sort. Happy Tree Friends is a great example of how this works – but it took producers Mondo Media nearly a decade to stumble into a successful economic model. Feature-length comedy and feature-length drama are more difficult nuts to crack, but they are not impossible. Again, the key is to find the communities which will be most interested in the production; this is not always entirely obvious, but the filmmaker should have some idea of the target audience for their film. While in preproduction, these communities need to be wooed and seduced into believing that this film is meant just for them, that it is salient. Productions can be released through complementary distribution channels: a limited, occasional run in rented exhibition spaces (which can be “events”, created to promote and showcase the film); direct DVD sales (which are highly lucrative if the producer does this directly); online distribution vehicles such as iTunes Movie Store; and through “community” viewing, where a DVD is given to a few key members of the community in the hopes that word-of-mouth will spread in that community, generating further DVD sales.

None of this guarantees success, but it is the way things work for independent productions in the 21st-century. All of this is new territory. It isn’t a role that belongs neatly to the producer of the film, nor, in the absence of studio muscle, is it something that a film distributor would be competent at. This may not be the producer’s job. But it is someone’s job. Someone must do it. Starting at the earliest stages of pre-production, someone has to sit down with the creatives and the producer and ask the hard questions: “Who is this film intended for?” “What audiences will want to see this film – or see it more than once?” “How do we reach these audiences?” From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online purchases.

So, as you sit down to do your planning today, and discuss how to move Irish screen industries into the 21st century, ask yourselves who will be fulfilling this role. The producer is already overloaded, time-poor, and may not be particularly good at marketing. The director has a vision, but might be practically autistic when it comes to working with communities. This is a new role, one that is utterly vital to the success of the production, but one which is not yet budgeted for, and one which we do not yet train people to fill. Individuals have succeeded in this new model through their own tireless efforts, but each of these have been scattershot; there is a way to systematize this. While every production and every marketing plan will be unique – drawn from the fundamentals of the story being told – there are commonalities across productions which people will be able to absorb and apply, production after production.

One of my favorite quotes from science fiction writer William Gibson goes, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” This is so obviously true for film and television production that I need only close by noting that there are a lot of success stories out there, individuals who have taken the new laws of hyperdistribution and sharing and turned them to their own advantage. It is a challenge, and there will be failures; but we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Media production has always been a gamble; but the audiences of the 21st century make success easier to achieve than ever before.

Everything is changing. Everything has changed. Everything always changes, but at times that change is particularly pronounced and thus specifically noteworthy. For media – which is the topic du jour – this is so plainly obvious that any attempt to refer to the “before” time has an almost archeological feel, as though we must shovel carefully through layers of dirt to uncover how media worked just a few year ago. These transformations have been seismic, and singular. There is no going back.

But what, exactly, has happened?

The revolution we glimpsed in 1994, when the rough beast of the Web, its hour come at last, made the earth tremble, seducing and subsuming us into its ever-broadening expanse, fell back, for a brief while, into patterns more established and more familiar. We glimpsed a utopia; then a fog rose, and the vision faded. We endured half a decade of stupidity, cupidity and the slow strangulation of dreams. We longed for communion; we got DVD players delivered in under an hour. Fortunately, the network accelerates everything it embraces, and what might have taken a generation in earlier times took just five years to run its course, from Netscape to Razorfish, and the lunar crater of NASDAQ seemed to spell the final doom of all our hopes. The Web, people loudly proclaimed, was so over.

Silly humans.

During those first five years, we learned just how different network economics could be; not just in theory, but in practice. We learned that the essence of the digital artifact is that it exists to be copied. Like a gene in the Cambrian seas of the early Web, information was copied and recopied endlessly. John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was one of the first such objects, spread via email and website until it became nearly impossible to ignore. More recently, Cory Doctorow’s lecture on DRM for Microsoft Research – in text, Pig Latin and video versions – has been passed around like a cheap two-dollar…well, you know. Each of these digital artifacts eventually reached nearly every single individual who might find them interesting, because, as they were copied and read, forwarded and linked to, each of the human nodes in this network made a decision that this information was important enough to share. In the networked era, salience is the only significant quality of information. For that reason, it was only a matter of time until the technologies of the network would reinforce this natural tendency, and accelerate it.

So even as the Web died, it was reborn. The top-down design of a hundred centralized sources of information evolved into seven hundred million peers. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Feeds replaced websites, and torrents replaced streams. The revolution we had fleetingly glimpsed had finally – blessedly – arrived.

But one man’s blessing is another’s curse.

The network revolution presented incredible opportunities to anyone working in the media industries. Suddenly, it became possible to reach massive audiences, unbounded by proximity. But instead of reinforcing the previous structures of media ownership and information distribution, the network has consistently undermined them. Mention Craigslist to a newspaperman, and watch as the color drains from their face. Casually drop BitTorrent into a conversation with a studio executive, and observe as they choke back their rage. The network carries within it the seeds of their destruction. And they’re absolutely, utterly, completely powerless to stop it.

This would be a sad story if professional media had not willingly cooperated in their own demise. The technologies of the digital era were simply too tempting to be ignored, too important to the bottom line. But the network has its own economics, and quickly overcomes or blithely ignores any attempt to subvert its innate qualities. Film studios make the majority of revenues from DVD distribution of their productions, but that same DVD, because of its essentially digital nature, can be copied and recopied endlessly, at no cost. If it is salient, it will be copied widely. That’s not just a horror story: that’s the law.

And if you don’t want your film copied? Well then, you have to resort to antique production technique. Make sure it’s shot to film stock, physically edited (good luck finding an editor who prefers a Steenbeck to an Avid) and graded – with no digital intermediates – then projected in an exhibition space where every audience member has been subjected to a humiliating physical search of their bodies. If you did that, you’d kill piracy. Probably. Of course, you’d also kill your exhibition revenues. But the studios (and the record companies, and the broadcasters, and the book publishers) want to have it both ways, want the benefits of digital distribution, all the while denying the essential quality of the medium – it exists to be copied.

That, at least, is the message from a hundred insta-pundits, on the business pages of newspapers, in blogs, and countlessanalysts’reports. The entire world seemed shocked by the entirely expected purchase of video-sharing site YouTube by Google for 1.65 billion dollars. It’s a bad deal, some say, doomed to fail. It isn’t worth it. It’ll bring Google crashing back to earth with endless litigation from the copyright holders who have just been waiting for someone with deep enough pockets to sue.

Feh.

What most everyone overlooked – as it happened the very same day as the Google purchase – were the licensing agreements YouTube struck with Universal, Sony BMG, and CBS. Together with their earlier deal with Warner, YouTube now has a deal with every major music publisher in the world. YouTube will now figure out how to share the revenues it will be generating with Google’s advertising technology with all of the copyright holders whose materials end up on YouTube.

Some pundits – most notably, Mark Cuban – have indicated that only a moron would buy YouTube, because it’s widely believed that YouTube has built its business entirely upon the violation of copyright. Certainly, YouTube established its reputation with a specific piece of video owned by someone else – a digital short from NBC’s Saturday Night Live, “Chronic Sunday.” That video – viewed millions of times before NBC rattled its legal saber and the content was removed – introduced most users to YouTube. In the year since “Chronic Sunday,” YouTube has become a clearing house for the funniest bits of video content produced by other companies, from segments of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, to South Park, to Family Guy to The Simpsons. Why has YouTube become the redistributors of these clips? Because none of the copyright holders made an effort to distribute these clips themselves. YouTube has been acting as an arbitrageur of media, equalizing an inequity in the market place – and getting very rich in the process. It may be copyright violation, but the power of the audience is far, far greater than the power of the copyright holder. YouTube could delete every clip uploaded in violation of copyright – to some degree they do – but if you have a few thousand people uploading the same clip, how do you stay ahead of that? Even YouTube itself is subject to the power of its audience. And if they become draconian in their enforcement of copyright – which is a possible outcome of the Google purchase – they will simply force the audience elsewhere, to other sites. Better by far to strike a deal with the copyright holders, so that they receive recompense for their efforts. NBC has started to distribute Saturday Night Live’s digital shorts on its own website; ABC and FOX offer full streaming versions of their programs; everyone is queuing up to sell their TV shows on iTunes. Is this a willing transition? Probably not. Minutes spent in front of the computer are minutes lost to television ratings. But if the copyright holders don’t distribute their content as widely as possible, someone else will. YouTube has proven this point beyond all argument.

Cuban believes that YouTube will die without a steady stream of content uploaded in violation of copyright. But if recent history is any guide, the studios are now falling over each other in their eagerness to do a deal, and share some of that money. The simultaneity of the Google purchase and the YouTube deals with the recording industry are not accidental; they’re indicative of a great sea-change. Big media has swallowed the bitter pill, and realized that they’ve lost control of distribution. Now they’ll try to make money off of it.

But Cuban makes another, and more damning point: he says that no one wants to watch the little hand-made videos which make up the vast majority of uploads to YouTube. This is the Big Lie of Big Media: if it isn’t professionally produced, the audience won’t watch it. No statement could be more mendacious, no assertion could be further from the truth. As a film producer and broadcaster, Cuban certainly hopes that audiences will always prefer professional content to amateur productions, but there’s no evidence to support this position – and rather a lot which counters it. The success of Red versus Blue, Homestar Runner, Happy Tree Friends, and The Show with Zefrank – each of which command audiences in the hundreds of thousands to millions – prove that audiences will find the content which interests them, and share that content with their friends, using the hyperdistribution techniques enabled by the network that ensure these audiences can get what they want – from anyone, anywhere, at any time – with a minimum of difficulty. These productions lie completely outside the bounds of “professional” media; they are “amateur,” not in the sense of raw, or poorly produced, but because they have turned their back on the antique systems of distribution which previously separated the big boys from the wannabes.

A perfect example of this transition can be seen in a video on YouTube by the Australian band Sick Puppies. Shot by the band’s drummer, it features a well-known character, Juan Mann, who inhabits Sydney’s Pitt Street mall, bearing a sign reading “Free Hugs.” The band befriended this unlikely character, and shot hours of video of him at work, giving free hugs to passers-by. While in Los Angeles, pursuing a recording deal, the drummer cut his footage into a three minute film, then added one the band’s song “All The Same” as a temp track. Thinking to share his work around, he uploaded the video to YouTube on the 26th of September, and told his friends. Who told their friends. Who told their friends. YouTube is particularly good at “viral” distribution of media – it’s the one thing they’ve gotten absolutely right – so, within three week’s time, that little hand-made video had been viewed well over three million times. Sick Puppies are now on the map; their music video has given them a worldwide fan base. A debut album on a major label – expected early next year – will complete their transformation from amateurs to professionals.

Salience determines whether an audience will gather around and share media, not production values. In the time before hyperdistribution, audiences had a severely limited pool of choices, all of them professionally produced; now the gates have come down, and audiences are free to make their own choices. When placed head-to-head, can a professional production of modest salience stand up against an amateur production of great salience? Absolutely not. The audience will always select the production which speaks to them most directly. Media is a form of language, and we always favor our mother tongue.

The future for YouTube lies with the amateurs, not with the professionals. Cuban misses the point entirely, assuming that the audience will behave as it always has. But this is not that audience; this is an audience which has essentially infinite choice, and has come to understand that the sharing of media is an act of production in itself – that we are all our own broadcasters.

And you’d have to be a moron to miss that.

III. The Epidemiology of Cool

We know why YouTube has had such an incredible string of successes; the site makes it easy to share a video with your friends, and for those friends to share that videos with their friends, and so on. The marketers call this “viral distribution,” but we know it by another and rather more prosaic name – friendship. As an inherently social species, we are constantly reinforcing the our social connections through communication. It could be an IM, a text message, an email, a phone call, or a video – it’s all the same to the enormous section of our forebrains that we use to process the intricacies of our social relationships. We share these things to tell our friends that we’re thinking of them – and, rather more competitively, to show our friends that we’re on the tip. Each of us are coolfinders (some of us do it professionally), and we each keep a little internal thermometer which measures our own cool against that of our peers. That innate drive to be recognized for our tastes has been accelerated to the speed of light by the network. Now, even as we coolfind, we are constantly inundated and challenged by the coolfinding of our peers. It’s produced a very healthy, if ultra-Darwinian, ecology of cool. Our peers are the selection pressure as we struggle to pass our memes on to the next generation.

Thus far, we’ve done this on our own, with very little assistance from the wealth of computing machinery which crowds our lives. We create ad-hoc solutions for media distribution: mailing lists, websites, podcasts – each of these an attempt to spread our ideas more successfully. But they’re held together tenuously, only by our constant activity, busy bees maintaining the cells of our hive. And it’s a lot of work. We’re forced to do it – forced to run the race, lest we be overrun by the memes of others – but we’ve reached the one practical limit: time. No one has enough time in the day to keep up with all of the information we should be absorbing. We can filter ruthlessly – and perhaps miss out on something we’ll regret later – or declare email bankruptcy, like Lawrence Lessig, or just withdraw to an ever-more-specialized domain of coolfinding. And we are doing each of these things, every day, under the pressure of all this information.

There’s got to be a better way.

In the early years of the 19th century, farmers in western Pennsylvania kept their wagon wheels greased with puddles of bubbling muck that studded the countryside. Although useful, the puddles were a toxic nuisance to livestock. If the farmers could have rid their lands of these puddles, they likely would have. A half a century later, western Pennsylvania became a boomtown, built on its substantial petroleum reserves. The bubbling muck had immense value – but it had to wait for the demands of the kerosene lamp and the internal combustion engine.

In the early years of the 21st century, we each generate an enormous amount of interaction data – every click on a computer, every email sent or received, every website visited, every text message, every phone call, every swipe of a credit card or loyalty card or debit card, every face-to-face interaction. None of it is recorded – or at least, it’s not recorded by any of us, for any of us (though the NSA has expressed some interest in it) – because it hasn’t been seen as valuable. It’s bubbling up through all of us, and around all of us, as we create data shadows that have grown longer and longer, resembling Jacob Marley’s lockboxes and chains, rattling throughout cyberspace.

All of that information is worth more than oil, more than gold. And all of it is sadly – almost obscenely – dropped on the floor as soon as it is created. If we’re lucky, it is deleted. If we’re unlucky, someone uses it to create a digital simulacrum, and we find our identities hijacked. But in no case is this information ever exposed to us, for our own use. We’re told it has no value to us, and – so far – we’ve been stupid enough to believe it.

But now, just now, economic forces are linking the persistence of our data shadows to our ability to filter the avalanche of information which characterizes life in the 21st century. Turns out this data guck is good for more than greasing the wheels of commerce. These data shadow glow with the evanescent echo of our real social networks – not the baby steps of MySpace and Friendster – but the real ground-truth interactions which reveal ourselves and our relations one to another. It is human metadata. And it is the most valuable thing we’ve got, now that there’s demand for it.

YouTube records every email address you use to forward a video to a friend. It uses these, at present, to do auto-completion of addresses as you type them in. It also presents a friendly list of these addresses, to make forwarding all that much easier. What they’re not doing – at least, not visibly, and very likely not at all – is keeping any record of what I sent to whom, nor when, nor why. Yet every video forwarded through YouTube is forwarded for a reason – salience. YouTube could record those moments of salience, could use them to build a model, a data shadow, which could reinforce your own ability to make decisions about who should see what. It might even, to some degree, automate that process. When you add to this the newly emerging capabilities of analytic folksonomy – comparing a user’s tag clouds against the tag clouds of others within their social network – certain other relationships and affinities emerge. Again, these relationships can be used to improve the capability of the system to help find, filter and forward relevant videos. This is how a social network really works. It’s not about having 500 first-degree friends in MySpace. It’s about listening to your naturally occurring social network to direct, improve, and accelerate information flow. When the brand-new power of the individual as broadcaster is reified by the capabilities of computing machinery to listen to and model our interactions, the result is hypercasting. This is what media distribution in the 21st century is inevitably hurtling toward, driven by the natural selection of steadily increasing informational pressure.

Hypercasting solves some lingering questions confronting us. The first and most important of these is: How will we figure out what to watch now that we’ve got a near-to-infinite set of choices? We’ll rely on the recommendation of our friends, as we always have, but now these recommendations will be backed up by a hypercasting system which will invisibly and pervasively keep track our interests, the points of interest we hold in common with our friends, our communities, our families, and our co-workers. It will not be automatic – no one really wants to see some out-of-control hypercasting system deluge us with video spam – but it will be so tightly integrated into our interactive experiences that it will barely register on our perceptions. We’ll simply come to expect that our iPods, our Media Centers, our PSPs and our mobiles are loaded up and ready for us, with things we’re sure to find compelling. Addiction to television will soar to new highs, a new crop of amateurs – millions of them – will find successful and lucrative careers in media production, and advertisers, as always, will find a way to spread their messages. On the surface, things will look much as they do now, but everything will move at a more rapid clip. Videos will fly across the world in seconds, not days, and a global audience of a million will gather in moments. Almost accidentally, this will change news reporting forever, as citizen journalism becomes a real threat to established media companies, and their utter undoing. Shouldn’t the New York Times be subject to the same pressures as NEWS Corporation?

Is YouTube the harbinger of the transition to hypercasting? The lead is theirs to lose. GooTube delivers over half of all videos seen on the Internet. They have the cash and the brainpower to transform broadcasting into hypercasting. And they have to worry about the next set of 20-somethings, in a garage, working on the Next Big Thing. Those kids, nurtured by YouTube, know just what’s wrong with it, and how to make it better. YouTube faces its own selection pressures, which will only increase as it grows exponentially and cuts content deals and just tries to keep the whole centralized mess up and running.

Yet it doesn’t matter. We have seen birth and death, and thought they were different. But the death of the Web brought a new kind of life, a vitality and surefootedness suppressed during the years of MBAs and crazy business plans and IPOs. Perhaps history is repeating itself, as everyone goes wild with another case of gold fever, and we’ll lose the plot again. In that case, we should be glad of another death.

Hypercasting might need to wait a few years, for a platform very much like a fully mature Democracy DTV – or something we haven’t even dreamt up. It may be that YouTube will disappoint. But that doesn’t mean anything at all. YouTube isn’t driving the evolution toward hypercasting. The audience is. And the audience – in its teeming, active, probing billions – always gets whatever it wants. That’s the first rule of show business.

Although Apple introduced its Video iPod at the end of 2005, this is the year when video begins to take off. Everywhere. The sheer profusion of devices which can play video – from iPods to desktop and laptop computers to Sony’s Playstation Portable, the Nintendo DS, and nearly all current-generation mobile phones – means that people will be watching more video, in more places, than ever before. You may not want to watch that episode of “Desperate Housewives” on your iPod – unless you happened to be tied up last Monday evening, and forgot to program your VCR. Then you’ll be glad you can. Sure, the picture is small and grainy, the sound’s a bit tinny, and your arms will get tired holding that screen in front of your face for an hour, but these drawbacks mean nothing to a true fan. And the true fans will lead this revolution.

We’re growing comfortable with the idea that screens are everywhere, that we can – in the time it takes to ride the train to work – get caught up on our favorite stories, the last World Cup match, and the news of the world. A generation ago it seemed odd to see someone in public wearing earphones; today it’s a matter of course. This afternoon it might seem odd to see someone staring into their mobile phone; tomorrow it will seem perfectly normal.

II

Now that video is everywhere, it won’t be long until the business of television moves online. Already, Apple has sold close to ten million episodes of television series like “Lost” and “The Office”. Google wants to sell you episodes of the original “Star Trek”, “The Brady Bunch” and “CSI”. For television producers it’s a win-win; they’ve already sold the episodes to broadcast networks – generally for a bit less than they cost to make – so the online sales are extra and vital dollars to cover the gap between loss and profit.

Today only a few of the hundreds of series shown in the US, UK and Australia are available for sale online. By the end of this year, most of them will be. Will the broadcast networks like this? Yes and no. It deprives them of some of the power they hold over the audience – to gather them at one place and time, eyeballs for advertisers – but it also creates new audiences: people see an episode online, and decide to tune in for the next one. That’s something we’ve already seen – “The Office”, for example, spiked upward in broadcast ratings after it was offered online. This year, there’s likely to be another breakout television hit – a new “Lost” – which starts its life online.

III

Once video is everywhere, once all our favorite television shows are available online for download, we’ll learn something else: there’s a lot more out there than just those shows produced for broadcast. On sites like Google Video and YouTube, you can already download tens of thousands of short- and full-length television programs. Some of them are woefully amateur productions, the kind that make you cringe in horror, but others – and there are more and more of these – are as funny and dramatic as anything you might see on broadcast television. Think TropFest – but a thousand times bigger.

Once we get used to the idea that television is something they can download, we’ll find ourselves drawn to these other, more unusual offerings. Most of this fare isn’t ready for prime-time. Much of it is only meant for a tight circle of friends and aficionados. But some of it will break through, and get audiences in the millions. It’s already happened a few times in the last year; this year it will become so common that, by the end of 2006, we’ll think nothing of it at all. This thought scares both the broadcast networks and the commercial TV producers. After all, if we’re spending our time watching something created by four kids in Goulburn, that’s time we’re not watching commercially-produced entertainment. And how do the networks compete with that?

IV

This fundamental transformation in how we find and watch entertainment isn’t confined to video. It’s happening to all other media, simultaneously. More people listen to the podcasts of Radio National than listen to the live broadcast; more people read the Sydney Morning Herald online than read the print edition. And these are just the professional offerings. As with television, each of these media are facing a rising sea of competition – from amateurs. Apple offers tens of thousands of podcasts through its iTunes Music Store – including Radio National – on just about any topic under the sun, from the mundane to the truly bizarre. You can get “feeds” of news from Fairfax – headlines and links to online versions of the stories – but you can also get that any of several thousand news-oriented blogs. Click a few buttons and the news is automatically downloaded to your computer, every half hour.

As it gets easier and easier for us to choose exactly what we want to watch, hear and read, the commercial and national broadcasters find themselves facing the “death of a thousand cuts.” Every pair of ears listening to a podcast is an audience member who won’t show up in the ratings. Every subscriber to an “amateur” news feed is a subscriber lost to a newspaper. And this trend is just beginning. In another decade, we’ll wonder how we lived without all this choice.

V

Choice is a beautiful thing. We define ourselves by the choices we make: what we do, who we know, what we fill our leisure time with. Now that our media is everywhere, available from everyone, any hour of the day or night, we’re going to find ourselves confronted by an unexpected problem: rather than trying to decide what to watch on five terrestrial broadcast channels – or fifty cable channels – we’ll have to pick from an ocean of a million different programs; even if most of them aren’t all that appealing, at least a few thousand will be, at any point in time.

That kind of choice will make us all a little bit crazy, because we’ll always be wondering if, just now, something better isn’t out there, waiting for us to download it. Like the channel surfer who sits, remote in hand, flipping through the channels, hoping for something to catch his eye, we’re going to be flipping through hundreds of thousands and then millions of choices of things to watch, hear and read. We’re going to be drowning in possibilities. And the pressure – to keep up, to be informed, to be on the tip – is about to create the most savvy generation of media consumers the world has ever seen.

We’re drowning in choice, but, because of that, we’ll figure out how to share what we know about what’s good. We already receive lots of email from friends and family with links to the best things they’ve found online. That’s going to continue, and accelerate; our circles of friends are becoming our TV programmers, our radio DJs, our newspaper editors, and we’ll return the favor. The media of the 21st century are created by us, edited by us, and broadcast by us. That’s a deep change, and a permanent one.

Consider the lowly VCR. Once the king of the consumer electronics roost, the Japanese giant Matsushita has stopped manufacturing them in favor of DVD players. Unless they’re combined with a DVD player, most people have stopped buying them. I haven’t bought one in Australia, despite the fact that I need one for work, because I am regularly given video briefs for review, inventions to be presented on THE NEW INVENTORS. But somehow I can’t bring myself to spend the $100 on a VCR. Is that because I’m cheap? Hardly. It’s because I think VCRs suck – and I’m sure most of you would agree. They’re low-resolution, finicky, and nearly impossible to program. Yet, despite all these obvious drawbacks, VCRs changed the world.

In the time before the VCR, the television set was nothing more than a radio-wave tuner connected to an analog monitor. The television could only show programs as they were broadcast. Nothing else. Suddenly, the VCR enabled people to record broadcasts for later playback, or play pre-recorded cassettes. The VCR introduced the concept of “time-shifting” (though that term didn’t emerge until quite recently), and freed the audience from the hegemony of the broadcaster. This was such a catastrophic change that court battles were fought over it: the United States Supreme Court, ruling in the Sony “Betamax” decision, allowed that the VCR could be sold legally, even though time-shifting a television program constituted a violation of copyright – and still does, here in Australia. (The legal status of time-shifting in the United States is vague.)

While time-shifting moved power away from the broadcasters and into the audience, it also created a huge market for pre-recorded entertainment. Theatrical release provided one hundred percent of studio revenues in 1954. By 2004, that figure was down to 15%. It seems that audience choice is good economics; when you empower audience viewing habits, you dramatically increase the overall market.

By the late-1980s, as the studios saw incredible revenues flow in from pre-recorded videocassettes, they got together to promote a format which would have all of the advantages of the VCR, with none of its disadvantages. This format would provide a near-cinema-quality experience, but would be a read-only format. Consumers would be given greater choice, but only from a pre-produced collection of offerings. DVD, like the VCR before it, has become another biggest success story in consumer electronics. At least 75% of all households in Australia have at least one DVD player, and they’re now standard equipment on nearly all personal computers. The studios earn more – often far more – from DVD sales than from the theatrical release of their motion pictures. The DVD has driven the VCR out of the living room, just as the CD player obsolesced the turntable, fifteen years ago.

II.

Nothing comes for free. The qualities that made the VCR, and the vinyl album before it, so annoying (noise, scratches, and just entropy in general) are the same qualities which made it a “safe” medium, so far as copyright protection was concerned. When the music industry transitioned from waves to bits, they unknowingly unleashed the engine of their own destruction. Waves are difficult to copy faithfully; every copy introduces noise and distortion. Bits can be copied perfectly every single time. Bits can be compressed and distributed at the speed of light. When digital music met the Web, back in 1993, the Internet Underground Music Archive, a small site running out of the University of California, Santa Cruz, everything changed. Suddenly, anyone could publish music, or download music, to anyone, anywhere. The combination of digital music plus the World Wide Web produced a resonance of sorts, a “sweet spot” which initiated a transformation that continues to this day, with over 42 million iPods and countless other digital music devices. Within this transformation there are countless secondary sweet spots – such as the iPod itself, and Apple’s iTunes Music Store – moments where technology and design meet in glorious union, producing prodigious amounts of heat and light. Like a spark to petrol, when design meets capability, the results can be explosive.

Like the music industry before them, the studios are confronting the cost of their transition from waves to bits. A DVD provides four times the picture quality of a VHS recording, together with 5.1 surround sound. It performs this magic by encoding a very high-bandwidth video signal into a relatively low-bandwidth data stream. This was high magic back in 1991, when the MPEG-2 standard was developed. Now it’s old tech. You can now squeeze a two hour movie into one-tenth the space, with no loss in quality. And that has changed everything about how we use video.

The first folks to realize this were a group of engineers who’d broken away from Silicon Graphics after working on Time-Warner’s Full Service Network, better known as “The Orlando Project.” This test bed (in Orlando, Florida) wired 1500 homes to very high-speed cable modems, and each home connected to the service through their own $60,000 Silicon Graphics workstation. The goal of The Orlando Project was to develop the future of video delivery – in other words, the system which would replace the analog cable systems which had by then fully penetrated the US market. Years ahead in interface design, The Orlando Project fully employed the 3D capabilities of the SGI workstation to create something known as “The Carousel,” which allowed home users to select from about 500 different offerings. (At the time, this was an order of magnitude more than any competitive offering.) The design of The Carousel – spearheaded by Dale Herigstad, who would go on to design the interface for Microsoft’s Media Center, and its Xbox 360 – attempted to guide the user through a bewildering set of video selections in a straightforward manner. While consumers liked The Carousel, Time-Warner cancelled the project to focus on other, less costly digital cable ventures. The engineers at Silicon Graphics, intrigued by what they’d started, soon left to form their own company.

In 1999 the Full Service Network bore unexpected fruit. TiVO, the company founded by those refugees from SGI, introduced its first “personal video recorder.” The idea of recording video to a hard drive for later playback was not new; electronic program guides had been used by cable companies for years. Yet, when these two technologies were integrated around an exceptionally well-designed user interface, another resonance struck, and a sweet spot appeared, one which is utterly transforming the way we think of video. People who could never hope to program a VCR have bought TiVOs in droves, recording all their favorite programs, and watching, on average, 60% more television than individuals who don’t have TiVOs. However, TiVO makes it exceptionally easy to fast-forward through commercial breaks, which is a plus for the audience, but a big concern to the broadcaster. By 2009, there’ll be at least a 30% drop-off in eyeballs watching TV advertisements, all because of TiVO and its many imitators. But the “TiVO effect” is far more profound. TiVO has disconnected any relationship between the network and the audience. The audience is watching a personalized stream of programming, one which bears no fundamental relationship to its source.

I discovered this TiVO effect when one of my friends – who has owned a TiVO for five years – recommended that I watch Making the Band: INXS. I asked him what network it was on. He thought for a long moment, and then said, “I have no idea.” After such along period of time with TiVO, the idea of broadcaster and programming have disassociated; it’s all just programs, on his TiVO. TiVO has become the broadcaster.

III.

This transformation in audience behavior wrought by TiVO points up an essential relationship between design and technology: where they meet in harmony, they produce a new medium. TiVO is the medium, and “the medium is the message.” TiVO has fundamentally changed the relationship between audience and programming; now that TiVOs are broadband-connected, they don’t even need television receivers. TiVOs could download programming directly from the Internet, or take recorded programs, and transmit them to anywhere on the Internet. The latest of TiVO’s competitors, the Slingbox, does this perfectly. I can connect a Slingbox at home in Surry Hills and watch any programming it has recorded, anywhere in the world. Not only have I disconnected the programming from the broadcaster, I’ve cut the cord to my television set. Now my television is anywhere I might be.

Still, TiVO and Slingbox have clung to the idea that there is a content source – that is, the television broadcaster – and an audience hungry for that content. That’s no longer true. With the recent advent of the Video iPod, the iTunes Video Store, Google Video, YouTube, and the ever growing influence of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, the balance of content is shifting away from the broadcasters to the “peer-productions” of the audience.

This is the revolution that’s waiting to happen. Right now there is no easy way for your average television viewer to find and view the enormous range of content that’s out on the Internet. File-sharing networks are either illegal, dangerous or too difficult for the average audience member to master. Google Video and YouTube must be viewed on a computer. None of the pieces fit together. Yet. And although the Video iPod can be plugged into a television set, very few people do it. It’s still too clumsy.

There is a resonance here, something that’s just on the cusp of happening. Someone (and it could well be Apple) will find a way to tie the television into the Internet meaningfully, formally breaking the bond between the television-as-radio-receiver and television-as-output-device. When that happens, the meaning of television channels and broadcasters will begin to fade into significance. We’ll still watch broadcasts of live events – such as news or sport – but otherwise our televisions will be portals into the ever-increasing supply of peer-produced programming. All we need to do is locate the sweet spot, the harmonious meeting point between design and technology.

It’s widely believed that technology is not informed by design disciplines. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without design, technology remains locked into a culture of expertise. Design-led technologies – such as TiVO and the iPod – transform our expectations and our behavior. Technology alone can not do that. It hasn’t the capability. We need to adjust our thinking. Design is not the handmaiden of technology. It’s the other way around. Design must be in the driver’s seat. Without the resonance which brings mind and hand together meaningfully, all we’ll ever have is unrealized potential. When design drives technology, when we assert that human needs trump raw capability, we create the artifacts which change the world.

Content. Everyone makes it. Everyone consumes it. If content is king, we are each the means of production. Every email, every blog post, every text message, all of these constitute production of content. In the earliest days of the web this was recognized explicitly; without a lot of people producing a lot of content, the web simply wouldn’t have come into being. Somewhere toward the end of 1995, this production formalized, and we saw the emergence of a professional class of web producers. This professional class asserts its authority over the audience on the basis of two undeniable strengths: first, it cultivates expertise; second, it maintains control over the mechanisms of distribution. In the early years of the Web, both of these strengths presented formidable barriers to entry. As we emerged from the amateur era of “pages about kitty-cats” into the branded web era of CNN.com, NYT.com, and AOL.com, the swarm of Internet users naturally gravitated to the high-quality information delivered through professional web sites. The more elite (and snobbish) of the early netizens decried this colonization of the electronic space by the mainstream media; they preferred the anarchic, imprecise and democratic community of newsgroups to the imperial aegis of Big Media.

In retrospect, both sides got it wrong. There was no replacement of anarchy for order; nor was there any centralization of attention around a suite of “portal” sites, though, for at least a decade it seemed precisely this was happening. Nevertheless, the swarm has a way of consistently surprising us, of finding its way out of any box drawn up around it. If, for a period of time, it suited the swarm to cozy up to the old and familiar, this was probably due more to habit than to any deep desire. When thrust into the hyper-connected realm of the Web, our natural first reaction is to seek signposts, handholds against the onrush of so much that clamors about its own significance. In cyberspace you can implicitly trust the BBC, but when it comes to The Smoking Gun or Disinformation, that trust must be earned. Still, once that trust has been won, there would be no going back. This is the essence of the process of media fragmentation. The engine that drives fragmentation is not increasing competition; it is increasing familiarization with the opportunities on offer.

We become familiar with online resources through “the Three Fs”. We find things, we filter them, we forward them along. Social networks evolve the media consumption patterns which suit themselves best; this is often not highly correlated with the content available from mainstream outlets. Over time, social networks tend to favor the obscure over the quotidian, as the obscure is the realm of the cognoscenti. This trend means that this fragmentation is both inevitable and bound to accelerate.

Fragmentation spreads the burden of expertise onto a swarm of nanoexperts. Anyone who is passionate, intelligent, and willing to make the attention investment to master the arcana of a particular area of inquiry can transform themselves into a nanoexpert. When a nanoexpert plugs into a social network that values this expertise (or is driven toward nanoexpertiese in order to raise their standing within an existing social network), this investment is rewarded, and the connection between nanoexpert and network is strongly reinforced. The nanoexpert becomes “structurally coupled” with the social network – for as long as they maintain that expertise against all competitors. This transformation is happening countless times each day, across the entire taxonomy of human expertise. This is the engine which has deprived the mainstream media of their position of authority.

While the net gave every appearance of centralization, it never allowed for a monopoly on distribution. That house was always built on sand. But the bastion of expertise, this took longer to disintegrate. Yet it has, buffeted by wave after wave of nanoexperts. With the rise of the nanoexpert, mainstream media have lost all of their “natural” advantages, yet they still have considerable economic, political and popular clout. We must examine how they could translate this evanescent power into something which can survive the transition to world of nanoexperts.

II.

While expertise has become a diffuse quality, located throughout the cloud of networked intelligence, the search for information has remained essentially unchanged for the past decade. Nearly everyone goes to Google (or a Google equivalent) as a first stop on a search for information. Google uses swarm intelligence to determine the “trust” value of an information source: the most “trusted” sites show up as the top hits on Google’s Page Rank. Thus, even though knowledge and understanding have become more widespread, the path toward them grows ever more concentrated. I still go to the New York Times for international news reporting, and the Sydney Morning Herald for local news. Why? These sources are familiar to me. I know what I’m going to get. That means a lot, because as the number of possible sources reaches toward infinity, I haven’t the time or the inclination to search out every possible source for news. I have come to trust the brand. In an era of infinite choice, a brand commands attention. Yet brands are being constantly eroded by the rise of the nanoexpert; the nanoexpert is persuaded by their own sensibility, not subject to the lure of a well-known brand. Although the brand may represent a powerful presence in the contemporary media environment, there is very little reason to believe this will be true a decade or even five years hence.

For this reason, branded media entities need to make an accommodation with the army of nanoexperts. They have no choice but to sue for peace. If these warring parties had nothing to offer one another, this would be a pointless enterprise. But each side has something impressive to offer up in a truce: the branded entities have readers, and the nanoexperts are constantly finding, filtering and forwarding things to be read. This would seem to be a perfect match, but for one paramount issue: editorial control. A branded media outlet asserts (with reason) that the editorial controls developed over a period of years (or, in the case of the Sydney Morning Herald, centuries) form the basis of a trust relationship with its audience. To disrupt or abandon those controls might do more than dilute the brand – they could quickly destroy it. No matter how authoritative a nanoexpert might be, all nanoexpert contributions represent an assault upon editorial control, because these works have been created outside of the systems of creative production which ensure a consistent, branded product. This is the major obstacle that must be overcome before nanoexperts and branding media can work together harmoniously.

If branded media refuse to accept the ascendancy of nanoexperts, they will find themselves entirely eroded by them. This argument represents the “nuclear option”, the put-the-fear-of-God-in-you representation of facts. It might seem completely reasonable to a nanoexpert, but appears entirely suspect to the branded media, seeing only increasing commercial concentration, not disintegration. For the most part, nanoexperts function outside systems of commerce; their currency is social standing. Nanoexpert economies of value are invisible to commercial entities; but that does not mean they don’t exist. If we convert to a currency of attention – again, considered highly suspect by branded media – we can represent the situation even more clearly: more and more of the audience’s attentions are absorbed by nanoexpert content. (This is particularly true of audiences under 25 years old, who have grown to maturity in the era of the Web.)

The point can not be made more plainly, nor would it do any good to soften the blow: this transition to nanoexpertise is inexorable – this is the ad-hoc behavior of the swarm of internet users. There’s only one question of any relevance: can this ad-hoc behavior be formalized? Can the systems of production of the branded media adapt themselves to an era of “peer production” by an army of nanoexperts? If branded media refuse to formalize these systems of peer production, the peer production communities will do so – and, in fact, many already have. Sites such as Slashdot, Boing Boing, and Federated Media Publishing have grown up around the idea that the nanoexpert community has more to offer microaudiences than any branded media outlet. Each of these sites gets millions of visitors, and while they may not match the hundreds of millions of visitors to the major media portals, what they lack in volume they make up for in their multiplicity; these are successful models, and they are being copied. The systems which support them are being replicated. The means of fragmentation are multiplying beyond any possibility of control.

III.

A branded media outlet can be thought of as a network of contributors, editors and publishers, organized around the goal of gaining and maintaining audience attention. The first step toward an incorporation of peer production into this network is simply to open the gates of contribution to the army of nanoexperts. However, just because the gates to the city are open does not mean the army will wander in. They must be drawn in, seduced by something on offer. As commercial entities, branded media can offer to translate the coin of attention into real currency. This is already their function, so they will need to make no change to their business models to accommodate this new set of production relationships.

In the era of networks, joining one network to another is as simple as establishing the appropriate connections and reinforcing these connections by an exchange of value which weights their connections appropriately. Content flows into the brand, while currency flows toward the nanoexperts. This transition is simple enough, once editorial concerns have been satisfied. The issues of editorial control are not trivial, nor should they be sublimated in the search for business opportunities; business have built their brand around an editorial voice, and should seek only to associate with those nanoexperts who understand and are responsive to that voice. Both sides will need to be flexible; the editorial voice must become broader without disintegrating into a common yowl, while the nanoexperts must put aside the preciousness which they have cultivated in search of their expertise. Both parties surrender something they consider innate in order to benefit from the new arrangement: that’s the real nature of this truce. It may be that some are unwilling to accommodate this new state of affairs: for the branded media, it means the death of a thousand cuts; for the nanoexpert it means they will remain confined to communities where they have immense status, but little else to show for it. In both cases, they will face the competition of these hybrid entities, and, against them neither group can hope to triumph. After a settling-out period, these hybrid beasts, drawing their DNA from the best of both worlds, will own the day.

What does this hybrid organization deliver? At the moment, branded media deliver a broad range of content to a broad audience, while nanoexperts deliver highly focused content to millions of microaudiences. How do these two pieces fit together? One of the “natural” advantages of branded media organizations springs from a decades-long investment in IT infrastructure, which has historically been used to distribute information to mass audiences. Yet, surprisingly, branded media organizations know very little about the individual members of their audience. This is precisely the inverse of the situation with the nanoexpert, who knows an enormous amount about the needs and tastes of the microaudience – that is, the social networks served by their expertise. Thus, there needs to be another form of information exchange between the branded media and the nanoexpert; it isn’t just the content which needs to be syndicated through the branded outlet, but the microaudiences themselves. This is not audience aggregation, but rather, an exploration in depth of the needs of each particular audience member. From this, working in concert, the army of nanoexperts and the branded media outlet can develop tools to deliver depth content to each audience member.

This methodology favors process over product; the relation between nanoexpert, branded media, and audience must necessarily co-evolve, working toward a harmony where each is providing depth information in order to improve the capabilities of the whole. (This is the essence of a network.) Audience members will assume a creative role in the creation of a “feed” which serves just themselves, and, in this sense, each audience member is a nanoexpert – expert in their own tastes.

The advantages of such a system, when put into operation, make it both possible and relatively easy to deliver commercial information of such a highly meaningful nature that it can no longer be called “advertising” in any classic sense of the word, but rather, will be considered a string of “opportunities.” These might include job offers, or investment opportunities, or experiences (travel & education), or the presentation of products. This is Google’s Ad Words refined to the utmost degree, and can only exist if all three parties to this venture – nanoexpert, branded media, and audience members – have fully invested the network with information that helps the network refine and deliver just what’s needed, just when it’s wanted. The revenue generated by a successful integration of commerce with this new model of syndication will more than fuel its efforts.

When successfully implemented, such a methodology would produce an enviable, and likely unassailable financial model, because we’re no longer talking about “reaching an audience”; instead, this hybrid media business is involved in millions of individual conversations, each of which evolves toward its own perfection. Individuals imbedded in this network – at any point in this network – would find it difficult to leave it, or even resist it. This is more than the daily news, better than the best newspaper or magazine ever published; it is individual, and personal, yet networked and global. This is the emerging model for factual publishing.